Mileage Help?

[MaybeMemories06 0]

Hey, I have looked around the forums to see if I could find this, because I remember seeing it, I just don't remember where it was...

For realism in my next city, I want to place my avenues about a mile apart, and I need to figure out how many tiles that would leave between each avenue. Any help is appreciated! And, if someone has a distance chart showing how many feet are in each square, etc, would be very helpful. Thanks in advance anyone that can answer

[Andreas Roth 604]

One tile is 16 x 16 meters (52.593 feet), and a large map has 256 x 256 tiles, that makes 4096 meters or 2.545 miles. So you'd have to place an avenue about every 100th tile. But be careful, the scale in SC4 isn't consistent with the real world, this setup will only work in large suburbs with low-density development. Any mid- and highrise zones will need more avenues and highways to carry the traffic.

[MaybeMemories06 0]

Thanks Andreas. Any suggestions on how far apart my avenues should *really* be to simulate real-life?

[ssc4k 1]

i usally place them where roads end up being crowded.

[Andreas Roth 604]

Yeah, SimCity doesn't work that well with a uniform grid, since the sims are way too stupid and always take the shortest road, not the fastest. Lay out your avenues in a way where they channel the traffic directly from one point to another, being shorter (in distance) than all secondary and tertiary roads and streets. This will prevent traffic jams and abandonment better than anything else.

[ssc4k 1]

Originally posted by: Andreas Roth Yeah, SimCity doesn't work that well with a uniform grid, since the sims are way too stupid and always take the shortest road, not the fastest. Lay out your avenues in a way where they channel the traffic directly from one point to another, being shorter (in distance) than all secondary and tertiary roads and streets. This will prevent traffic jams and abandonment better than anything else.quote>

 

this got me thinking, does NAM make the game consider speed?

[Andreas Roth 604]

Yes and no. Of course, you can use (or edit) a traffic plugin where the max. speed limit of the avenues is ten times higher, but the sims still tend to use the shortest way possible. It might be possible to reduce the number a bit with using the "perfect pathfinding" version of the plugin, but obviously, that also affects the performance of the game itself.

There's one thing you cannot overcome, though: The routes of the commuters are calculated every few months or so, depending on the performance of your computer. You can easily see this when using the route query tool and letting the game run for a few months - once you destroy one road, it'll takes the game some time to calculate new routes. Now, if there are two or more possibilities for the commuters to get to their destination, the game has to decide which one to use. Obviously, this has to be the fastest one, because that's what the pathfinding engine is programmed to do.

But when one of the roads/avenues is used heavily, traffic jams will occur, making commuting slower. So it could be the case that the alternative route now seems to be faster, so the pathfinding engine switches over to that one. In the next cycle, the other road is used more, causing another switch back to the old route (keep in mind that the amount of traffic changes whenever new buildings are growing, so it's even more complicated). You can easily trigger this behavior by placing a toll booth - the results will be extreme, since one route will be used heavily in one cycle, the game switches routes to the unused one during the next calculation, and switches back in the third cycle. Eventually, this will kill your whole traffic network, so it's better to build dedicated routes, leaving the game little to no alternatives.

[jplumbley 5]

Thats some good information there Andreas.... I had always thought that the pathfinding engine had a little more dynamic approach like the way the internet uses hop counts and time delays to determine the best route. But it sounds like it is more linear in which it looks for the shortest possible route and then if 2 or more routes are the same distance it chooses the fastest route. Unfortunately Maxis didnt make it more dynamic, but that probably would have affected preformance quite a bit more.

[MaybeMemories06 0]

So from a strictly eye-candy point of view, what would an ideal distance be to simulate a grid with a mile between each road? I'm more into looks than actual function, and usually play the game as more of a sandbox than sim.

[ssc4k 1]

for eye candy i would say abotu 15- 20 tiles.

[packersfan 666]

every 100 tiles is fine if you have NAM. In my city I have them every 60 I think with roads every 30 but in real life most cities main roads are about 70 to 100 tiles apart, like in Milwaukee, for instance.

[packersfan 666]

Can't wait until SimCity 5, where Sims have actually brains and use smart routes like avenues, roads, freeways before resorting to streets. They should take into consideration distance/speed not just distance! Most people would rather bypass a stoplight ridden road and use a freeway for a longer distance trip but the sims are idiots and don't care.

[ssc4k 1]

packersfan: you can use the edit button next time you want to add something to the last post.